A Throwback to an Earlier Age of Hijacking

Though little is known about the pilot who hijacked Ethiopian Airlines Flight 702 to Geneva early on Monday morning, it’s safe to assume that he’s quite the optimist. Even during the heyday of air piracy, in the early nineteen-seventies, when the desperate and deranged commandeered commercial jets on a nearly weekly basis, asylum-seeking hijackers rarely lived happily ever after. The scores who flew from the United States to Cuba may have expected warm welcomes, for example, but Fidel Castro actually feared these adventurers as potential threats to the revolution—he assumed that some were C.I.A. spies, while the rest were psychopaths. The hijackers were usually interrogated at length by Cuba’s secret police, then either cast into sugar-harvesting gulags or forced to live hand to mouth in a decrepit south Havana dormitory. Few emerged from the experience with anything but regrets.

Hijackers who had designs on settling down in more prosperous nations had even less success than their Cuba-bound counterparts. Developed nations were typically reluctant to let hijacked planes land within their borders; their governments realized that the crime was viral in nature, and that accepting one flight would encourage the ambitions of a host of copycats. In 1972, when the hijackers of Western Airlines Flight 701 expressed a desire to seek asylum in Switzerland, officials in Bern refused to let the plane touch down in Geneva; they had no wish for their country to gain a reputation as the Cuba of the Alps.

A few hijackers beat the odds by offering compelling personal narratives. Shortly after the Iron Curtain descended across Europe, for example, a group of Czech soldiers hijacked three planes simultaneously and headed for West Berlin, where they gained asylum by claiming to have narrowly escaped a Stalinist purge. In the thick of the Cold War’s initial phase, Western officials couldn’t resist a tale that so vividly confirmed the evils of Communism.

Nearly two decades later, an Italian-American Marine named Raffaele Minichiello took TWA Flight 85 from Los Angeles to Rome, with intermediate stops in Denver; New York; Bangor, Maine; and Shannon, Ireland. Minichiello’s most immediate motive was to flee a court martial for burglarizing the post exchange at Camp Pendleton, but he was able to frame his crime as the result of a trauma that he had endured while earning a Purple Heart in Vietnam—a claim that evoked great sympathy from an Italian public that was increasingly appalled by the war. (Minichiello’s cause was also aided by the fact that he was rather easy on the eyes.) At the trial, in Rome, Minichiello’s lawyer characterized his client as an “uncultured peasant” whose simple mind had been overwhelmed by “a civilization of aircraft and war violence.” Acquitted of all charges save for weapons possession, Minichiello spent just eighteen months in jail; upon his release, he signed a contract to star in a spaghetti Western. (He now has a YouTube channel largely dedicated to accordion music.)

Unfortunately for the hijacker of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 702, the pervasive political oppression in his native country is not an issue that resonates much in Europe—and certainly not in Switzerland, which recently demonstrated its growing callousness toward those who dream of seeking better circumstances in Zurich or Geneva. More damning to the pilot’s prospects, however, may be the way that hijacking has become such a beastly crime in the popular imagination. When Minichiello winged his way across the Atlantic Ocean, in 1969, seizing a plane was viewed as a relatively harmless negotiating ploy—an inconvenience to everyone involved, for sure, but not a crime likely to result in death or destruction. The airlines followed a policy of total compliance with all hijacker demands, no matter how outlandish; the assumption was that doing so was safer than encouraging crew members to use violence to thwart hijackings, and far cheaper than paying for metal detectors and security personnel on the ground. Having a jet swept off to Havana, Algiers, or Buenos Aires for a day was just a moderately priced headache, not a threat to American national security.

The negotiators of yore were obviously supplanted by hijackers with more vicious purposes in mind. And so, even though the Ethiopian pilot seems like a throwback to a gentler era of air piracy, his crime may be reflexively viewed as a bit too similar to terrorism. His best bet for asylum, then, is to try to make his personal story of persecution one that the Swiss public cannot ignore. Unless he shares Raffaele Minichiello’s matinee-idol looks, that may be an impossible challenge.